Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Stossel

The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, VISA will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, 'experts' in government can't even count the vote accurately.

John Steinbeck

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

Nora Roberts

He wanted to heave the glasses against the wall. Break them, break everything he could reach. Beat it, rend it. He stared out the window, imagined the city in flames, consumed to ashes. And still it wasn't enough.

Nikolai Gogol

I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco.

Nikos Kazantzakis

In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.

For sure, all over Poland, kids had my picture of a lemur on their bedroom wall - but the chances are they may never get to see a real lemur in Madagascar. I thought this was great and it really meant a lot to me.

Niels Bohr

A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. 'Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?' he asks. 'No,' replies the colleague, 'but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it.'

Nas

Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A good rule of thumb is as follows: If the numbers come from somebody wearing a tie (Wall Street economist or analyst, industry public relations department, captive think tank academic and so on), you ought to be very skeptical. By design messages from these people are intended to move markets, move merchandise and/or move public policy and are not a comment on the state of the physical universe.

John Ruskin

Men say their pinnacles point to heaven. Why, so does every tree that buds, and every bird that rises as it sings. Men say their aisles are good for worship. Why, so is every mountain glen and rough sea-shore. But this they have of distinct and indisputable glory,--that their mighty walls were never raised, and never shall be, but by men who love and aid each other in their weakness.

Matt Taibbi

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

Matt Taibbi

Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.

Matt Taibbi

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

Matt Taibbi

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

Matt Taibbi

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

Matt Taibbi

Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.

Matt Taibbi

'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail.

Meg Wolitzer

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

Max Brooks

During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

Maurice de Vlaminck

Vermilion alone could render the brilliant red of the tiles on the opposite slope. The orange of the soil, the harsh crude colors of the walls and greenery, the ultramarine and cobalt of the sky achieved an extreme harmony that was sensually and musically ordered.

Mark Skousen

I've felt for some time that economics needs to be taught differently by economists who actually have had experience making a payroll or investing on Wall Street. When economics is taught by pure academics, watch out.

Marina Abramovic

When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he cant cover himself with words, he cant create a wall.

Mary Engelbreit

Life is too short to leave your walls bare or colorless. Unless you like bare and colorless then it is fine.

Patricia Briggs

Do you have any idea how much I love you?” he asked. ”Enough to accept my apologies?” I suggested in a small voice. ”Heck no,” he said, and pushed off from the wall, stalking forward. When he reached me, he put his hands up and touched the sides of my neck with the tips of his fingers – as if I were something fragile. ”No apologies from you,” he told me, his voice soft enough to melt my knees and most of my other parts.

Pablo Neruda

Our love was born outside the walls, in the wind, in the night, in the earth, and that's why the clay and the flower, the mud and the roots know your name.

Pablo Neruda

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

Plato

When the music changes, the walls of the city shake.

Paula Malcomson

As actors, we're a little faster than other people, with breaking down the walls.

Phil Keoghan

If you look around my room, you see lots of lists. I'm inspired by what's up on the wall.

Lech Walesa

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

Philip Johnson

Concrete you can mold, you can press it into - after all, you haven't any straight lines in your body. Why should we have straight lines in our architecture? You'd be surprised when you go into a room that has no straight line - how marvelous it is that you can feel the walls talking back to you, as it were.